…from where you say? Wuppertal! It’s a little German city I just dropped in on while passing through from Hamburg to Cologne.
Why would I bother stopping in a small nondescript city on the outskirts of the Rhine-Ruhr? There is only one reason to visit Wuppertal, the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn!
The, ahem, Anlage einer elektrischen Hochbahn Schwebebahn System Eugen Langen, which translates roughly to ‘electric elevated swinging railway system’, is the oldest suspension monorail in the world.
The hanging carriages indeed do swing around the corners, in the same way a motorcyclist leans into a turn. The trains, if you can call them that, are fairly small but come by every two or three minutes so great frequency and capacity. This setup has been running since 1901, and the one line carries some 25 million passengers a year.
It’s actually a fairly ingenious solution to an urban mobility problem. The city of Wuppertal grew as a conurbation of villages stretching down both sides of a river valley. Rather than demolish buildings for a conventional railway or dig underground at great expense, the city elected to use it’s very heart for transport: the river. The Schwebebahn hangs on A frame struts over the water as the gentle Wupper winds it’s way through the city. The swinging system allows the track to follow the sweeping curves of the river at high speed while keeping the passengers comfortable, while the track is totally grade separated and completely avoids all buildings and other structures.
A real oddity, but certainly fun and undeniably functional. The only thing that perplexes me is I noticed the carriages are only driven from one end. Somehow at each end of the line manage to turn these things around!
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Here’s a video of the system in action : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxYLRJCbCLA&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Love the sounds the trains and the supporting infrastructure makes at the end of the line – I feel a song coming on…
Certainly striking! I wonder why they didn’t go with light rail, as so many other cities in that part of the world did.
Much of the route is above a small river, impractical with light rail.
Yes, but that doesn’t answer my question, since much of the city is on land.
Trams still have to stop at traffic lights and merge with other traffic where roads aren’t wide enough, this provides a fully grade-separate metro that you could almost call a U-bahn. This is why I dislike on-road busways being included in the CFN in the same category as fully grade-separate ones like the Northern Busway.
Yes as Hanish suggests they wanted true grade separated rapid transit, an alternative to metro or elevated rail (or U-Bahn or Hoch-Bahn rather). Part of the reason was this was a test case intended to prove the concept for much larger networks in big cities with a lot of rivers, most specifically Berlin.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. A (rather successful) proof of concept.
I believe the Wuppertal Monorail had some influence in the buidling of the Chiba Monorail (east of Tokyo). The Chiba system is a real eyesore however, unlike Wuppertal. Everytime I go past the Chiba Monorail on my way between Narita Airport and Tokyo central, its an architectural blight on the landscape – sticks out like a sore thumb, an ugly, hulking mass : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOsJrU5XUIw&feature=youtube_gdata_player
It’s worth going on Google Earth and tracing the line, looking at more photos en route. I should think that keeping all that steelwork painted is much like the Forth Bridge: a permenant job for quite a lot of people!
Sorry, a PERMANENT job…
Pity it’s a visual monstrosity as the idea is pretty cool
The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn pales in comparison to the ugliness of the Chiba Monorail.
Wuppertal pales in comparison to the ugliness of the Chiba Monorail.
Although very much in the style of it’s time. Remember all those drawings from the days of H G Wells and Jules Verne where they imagined cities of the future? Lots of dramatic structures built in cast iron and steel.
I think the same idea constructed in the materials of the 21st century would probably look very slim and elegant.
It’s pretty cool and unusual Not terribly pretty, but noone has ever been hit and killed by one! Great for safety. lol
Actually, five people died and 47 were injured when a part of the construction failed in 1999, causing the carriage to fall on to a pipeline.
Does this still have a practical transport use or is it just a tourist novelty?
Nick says in the post that it carries 25 million people a year which is massive. Auckland and Wellington’s whole rail network are only something like 10 million each. So, it’s certainly no novelty.
It’s route 60 in the local public transport system – see http://www.wsw-online.de/mobilitaet/Downloads/Plaene_Verzeichnisse/2014_Fahrplanbuch/60.pdf
Yes it does: 25 million trips a year means the one line carries about double the patronage of the entire Wellington rail network, in a city about the same size.
2.20 Euro per trip. pretty cheap compared to NZ pt
Here’s the rub. It’s a 13.3km system serving a city of 340,000 people AND it moves 25million passengers per year. Ok, it has taken over 100yrs to get to that figure but surely we can get the AKL train network to 20Million in pretty short order.
Schwebebahn.. hence the shweeb.. http://shweeb.co.nz/
And while it’s a neat novelty, the visual impact along with the one Rob highlighted in Toyko are perfect examples of why elevated PRT Pods down every main road will never be accepted by the general population
I like it. Very steampunk.
Steampunk is a great description 🙂
Good to see that you have been out and about checking out some interesting corners of our planet Nick R!
Hope you enjoy Cologne.
Electric steampunk, no less.
It is famous (especially among children) for its association with an elephant named Tuffi that jumped from the monorail – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuffi